An Open Source Freebie for Anyone Interested in Electrolysis

It wouldn't surprise me if somebody has already looked into and rejected this suggestion, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. You never know. Perhaps somebody has, forgotten about it, and now its time to ask again.

If it were possible to create holes in an electrically conductive material that were just a little smaller than a water molecule in its vapor state, and at very high temperature and pressure, such that the water molecule couldn't pass through, you could create a chamber that could do electrolysis in a quite novel new way.

The chamber in question would be subject to both a very strong magnetic field, as well as the electrical differential of perforated electrodes that would be hollow. The magnetic field polarity would match the electrode polarity so that not only would the water molecule be energized to the proper alignment, but hydrogen would go to its electrode, and oxygen to the other. One might even try to get the pressurized steam to maze as well.

This is not an idle question for me. Several decades ago I went to a University of Washington professor and paid him to do very down and dirty feasibility calculations on whether the magnetic field and maze resonance energizing would be sufficient to split water vapor at high temperature and pressure. I did this as part of considering the electrolysis options of my sea based variation of the Yen Tornado wind turbine.

His sense was that you would separate some of the water vapor but it would definitely be incomplete; even to the point of ending up with hydrogen peroxide, as well as a little left over H2O. If you could throw in the electrical differential, even without the resonance thing, and the only escape aperture was smaller than H2O, the results might be a great deal more conducive to a viable process.

The thing to remember with sea water is that you would want to boil it in the first place in order to get rid of the salt before you subjected it to the electrical differential. Skipping the step of having to let it condense back to its liquid state would be helpful indeed.

There are, of course, a lot of ifs here, and it would take some significant resources to work through them all. Holes that small in a material able to handle temperature, pressure and be conductive to boot, even in today's nano tech, materials rich, world may still not be possible, but its still an approach that everyone should keep in mind.